MEGAN’S FOLLOWERS

A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!

by

OWEN JONES

Copyright © January 7th 2015 Owen Jones

Megan’s Followers

by Owen Jones

Published by Megan Publishing Services

https://meganthemisconception.com

The right of Owen Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously.

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

MEGAN’S FOLLOWERS

Copyright

Contact

Other novellas in the same series:

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

1 THE SURPRISE

2 SOCIAL MEDIA

3 THE PROS AND CONS

4 JANE AND ROD

5 WACINHINSHA

The End

GLOSSARY

THE DISALLOWED

Other books by the same author

Contact me at:

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http://twitter.com/owen_author

http://owencerijones.com

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Other novellas in the same series:

The Psychic Megan Series

A Spirit Guide, A Ghost Tiger and One Scary Mother!

The Misconception

Megan’s Thirteenth

Megan’s School Trip

Megan’s School Exams

Megan’s Followers

Megan and the Lost Cat

Megan and the Mayoress

Megan Faces Derision

Megan’s Grandparents Visit

Megan’s Father Falls Ill

Megan Goes on Holiday

Megan and the Burglar

Megan and the Cyclist

Megan and The Old Lady

Megan’s Garden

Megan Goes To The Zoo

Megan Goes Hiking

Megan and the W. I. Cookery Competition

Megan Goes Riding

Megan Goes Yachting

Megan at Carnival

Megan at Christmas

Megan Gets Sick

DEDICATION

This edition is dedicated to my friend Murray Bromley, who helped me and my Thai family in 2013 more than he will ever realise; and my wife, Pranom, without whose support none of my books would ever have been written.

Karma will repay everyone in just kind.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

1 The Surprise

2 Social Media

3 The Pros and Cons

4 Jane and Rod

5 Wacinhinsha

Glossary

The Disallowed

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks are due to the artist who drew the cover for me,

Jacqueline Chavarria

1 THE SURPRISE

It was Saturday morning on a Bank Holiday weekend and Megan awoke from a dream, in which she had been to the beach with her grandfather – her mother’s father, who had died before she was born, but whom she had always seen quite often, for a dead person. They had travelled to a beach that he had shown her before in the first lesson that she had ever had on flying or Astral Travelling, as they called it.

She loved the sensation of freedom that it gave her and she was pleased that she was now capable of remembering where she had been and with whom, if she hadn’t gone alone. That ability to remember was a fairly recent development, which she had been told to expect as she got used to performing her new trick as she still thought of it, despite having been told several times that it was something quite normal that everyone could and indeed did do regularly. The ‘trick’, if there was one, was to remember where one had been and what one had done.

Megan was not the sort of person to lie in, especially when the sun was streaming in through the open curtains, so she got up, put on her dressing gown and slippers, and went downstairs, following the glorious smell of frying bacon. She had been told in school in one of her lessons about the dangers of eating too much meat and cholesterol, but a traditional breakfast of cornflakes, followed by bacon and eggs, toast and tea was still her favourite meal of the day. She liked the smell of coffee, but she was not allowed to drink that until she was sixteen, because her mother had some idea that it could hurt a young person.

She wasn’t sure whether that was true and she didn’t really believe that meat could harm her either, especially not when you were a growing, active young teenager. Adults had some very strange ideas, she thought sometimes. Hadn’t people eaten these things for centuries? It was obvious to Megan that it was not the cholesterol that was killing people, but the lack of exercise, but she didn’t like to say anything. Working behind a desk was hardly the same as working behind a plough. She thought that that was pretty obvious.

She opened the door to the living room and saw what she expected: her father reading the paper at the table with his breakfast in front of him and her mother in the kitchen busying herself with cooking and cleaning.

“Good morning, Dad,” she greeted him and, “good morning, Mam” a little louder, so that she might be heard over the sound of water running from the tap.

“Morning, Megan. Sleep well?” It was his standard greeting when he was reading the paper, which he lowered to below his line of sight just long enough to catch Megan’s eyes and nod in her direction.

“Yes, I’m fine, Dad, and you?” She didn’t stop to wait for his reply, but continued into the kitchen. “Good morning Mam,” she repeated.

“Do you want your breakfast now or later, darling?”

“I’ll have it now, please, but why don’t I wait for you and we can eat together? I’ll make us a cup of tea.”

“Yes, OK, as you please, ask your Dad if he wants a top up too, dear. There’s a good girl.”

Megan did as she was bid and carried the three cups of tea to the table and awaited her breakfast.

“Anything happening in the world that a teenage girl should know about, Dad?”

“Pardon?”

She repeated her question, and he knew she was only being playful to annoy him.

“The dollar’s up against the pound, but the Euro is down. The government is thinking of changing the law to make it compulsory to stay in school until twenty-one to cut unemployment figures,” he joked back without looking at her. “The usual thing, you know.”

“Why haven’t we got any politicians in our family, Dad? I mean, there never have been any, have there?”

“No, not in our family… Too busy working. You need money to be a politician. That’s why a lot of them are solicitors or from public school. They’ve either got a good job or their parents have or had.”

“But you’ve got a good job, haven’t you, Daddy? Does that mean that I could go into politics, if I wanted to?”

“Mmm, I haven’t got a bad job, but you would need a good job too, if you wanted to become a national politician. I don’t earn that much more than normal.” He folded the paper neatly and put it down, realising that he was not going to be left in peace to finish it at the breakfast table.

“Why, what’s this all about? You want to be the next Maggie Thatcher or Hilary Clinton, do you?”

“Perhaps, well, I don’t know… I’ve never thought about it before, but why not?”

“There is no reason why not, dear… except: money, education, backers and a burning ambition to succeed. That’s all. I’m sure you could do it if you wanted to.”

Her mother slid a plate in front of her, put one before herself and sat down.

“Careful, Megan, the plate is very hot, it just come out of the oven. So, what were you two talking about?”

“Oh, nothing,” answered her husband, “only our daughter’s future as the next Maggie Thatcher, unless someone beats her to it.”

Nothing more was offered, so she started to eat, feeling left out of a potentially interesting subject of conversation.

“Did you bring up the matter of you know what, Robert?”

He looked at her blankly for a moment, as she made faces at him and pointed at Megan with her chin.

“You know… What we were talking about the other day…”

“Ah, no, not yet. I was sort of waiting for you to be present. Ah, Megan, you have been using my old office computer in your bedroom for the last few years… it must be getting quite old by now, so your mother and I thought that it was time we got you another one. We both think you deserve it after your recent exam results.

“What do you think? Would you like a new desktop computer or would you prefer a laptop? I suppose most of your friends will have laptops these days, won’t they, so that they can work on the same machine at home and at school?”

“Yes, Dad. There aren’t many of us left without our own laptop these days, but we can manage quite easily enough with a portable hard drive, the Cloud and logging into the school’s mainframe. It would be great to have a laptop, but it’s not absolutely essential.”

“Well, thank you for being so honest, my dear, but your mother and I want to do this for you, so, if you like, we’ll pick one up when we go shopping later on. Do you want to come and help us choose or will you leave it up to us?”

It was a strange question to Megan since she went shopping with her parents most Saturdays. She loved walking around the shops even if she had no money to spend. She looked at her father, then her mother and back at her father and then they all three burst out laughing.

“Oh, I think that I would have to come for this, don’t you? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Thank you ever so much. I love you both very much… You have to be the best parents in the world.”

She got up, kissed them both and then asked to be excused.

“I’ll just take these plates and things out to the kitchen and then I’ll go shower and change. Same time as every week?”

“Yes, ten o’clock.”

Megan bounded up the stairs on all fours in imitation of Grrr, whom she could not wait to tell the good news.

Grrr too was where Megan expected her to be. The large ghost of her Siberian tiger friend was stretched out on her bed lazily looking at the door. Her tail flicked a little in recognition of her ward.

“Grrr, Mam and Dad are going to buy me a new laptop – that’s a computer to you! Isn’t that great news?!”

Grrr licked her hand as she sat down on the bed.

“Oh, your tongue is like sandpaper.” Grrr didn’t seem to take any notice of Megan’s good news or her rude remark about her tongue, she just kept licking her until Megan thought that it was time to go for a shower.

In the shower, Megan became aware that she was becoming more sensitive to the touch of Grrr. It hadn’t been that long ago that she hadn’t been able to stroke Grrr, or rather she had, but her hand used to end up being ‘inside’ Grrr, whereas she had just jokingly complained that her tongue was like sandpaper. She would not have known that even a few days ago. It was pleasing to Megan that she was now more able to treat Grrr like a real live cat.

In the car, Megan was full of questions about the new computer, but she had been brought up not to distract the driver with idle conversation and her mother knew nothing at all about computers, so she just had to hold herself in until they got to the shopping mall. It was a hard thing to do as she felt fit to burst. When the car stopped, Megan ran on ahead to the computer department to wait for her father, while her mother went to start the weekly shopping routine alone.

The sales assistants hovered close by, but allowed them to look around on their own. Both father and daughter were fairly open-minded about which computer they wanted, although Megan wanted an Asus like most of her friends and Robert didn’t want to spend more than six hundred pounds. They looked at Asus, Acer, Dell and Fuji machines, but they both kept coming back to the Asus.

They called the assistant over and allowed him to give his sales patter. Little did he know that they were already both sold on the machine, because they listened so attentively and politely. When he had finished, Robert said that he would take the Asus laptop, if they would bump the RAM up to 8 GB and install it that afternoon free of charge. The salesman went to check with the manager, but he agreed, so they left to help with the shopping while the upgrade was being carried out.

When they returned ninety minutes later after having put the shopping in the car and drinking a cup of coffee in the store café, the computer was ready and Robert bought a multi-media add on pack consisting of a small external microphone and a pair of speakers. He said knowingly that they were necessary because the quality of the speakers and microphone built into laptop was insufficient for ‘serious work’.

Megan was not sure what he had meant by serious work, but her father could say or do nothing wrong at the time, so she accepted them gratefully. As they left the store, a man called out to her:

“What a happy-looking young lady! A face like that is enough to brighten anyone’s day. How are you doing, Miss?” He nodded at Robert and Suzanne too. They recognised the man as one of the security guards who had been involved with the break in of their car several months previously.

“Caught any more car thieves, have you? Megan, isn’t it?”

“Hello, how are you?” replied Megan politely. “No…, but my parents just bought me my first laptop and I’m so happy I could burst.”

“Well, I’m sure that you deserve it. You are a brave girl. Good afternoon to you all. Mind how you go now,” and he gave a small salute.

Megan and her parents nodded back

“That was nice of the security guard to remember you, Megan” said her mother, but Megan was already skipping ten yards ahead on her way to the car.

2 SOCIAL MEDIA

When they arrived home, Megan asked to be allowed to go to her room to set up her new computer.

“Aren’t you going to help us unload the car first?”

“Sure, Dad, sorry, I’m just so excited I can’t wait.”

“Yes, well, help us carry everything into the house, I’ll help your mother put it all away and then I’ll be up to help you install everything properly.”

“OK, Dad, thanks,” she said, but she thought that she could do it without any assistance. However, she could see how keen her father was to help her so she allowed him to do it. He knocked and entered ten minutes later with a chair that he had brought up for himself. Megan looked anxiously at Grrr, who was still lying on the bed watching everything that was going on.

She had a sudden thought: ‘what if it was not that she was becoming more sensitive, but that Grrr was manifesting herself more strongly? What if her father saw Grrr?’ She knew that there was nothing she could do about Grrr. After all, no-one can frighten a ghost tiger away, but what would he say? There was nothing she could do but wait and see. She surprised herself when she realised that she actually wanted her father to see Grrr, but he hadn’t yet and she was pretty obvious. You can’t miss a ten foot tiger lying on a bed in a suburban box bedroom.

“OK, first we’ll make some room here for the laptop and plug the battery in. Let’s see how much power is in that. Ten minutes… Plug the computer into the mains, we might as well charge the battery up too. Now, switch your desktop computer on. Now, we’ll check which programmes and data you want to transfer over to the laptop.”

They spent several hours transferring programmes and data and Megan was glad of her father’s help since she had not thought about how to do that and wouldn’t have known anyway. When the job was complete, Robert switched off the desktop computer, unplugged it and pushed it under the bed.

“We can decide what to do with that again.” His face was a foot from Grrr’s who was looking at him peacefully. “If you want to print, you can plug this lead in here or better still we can plug the printer in here and now you can print wirelessly too. I’m going back downstairs now. Have fun.”

“OK, Dad, I will, thanks for the computer again and thanks for all your help.”

“It is my pleasure, darling. Why don’t you turn the radiator up? I fancy it’s a little cold in here. Are you cold?”

“No, Dad, not at all.”

“I was sure I felt a draft by your bed just now… not a cold draft really, just a strange draft. Maybe it’s just me… perhaps I’m coming down with a cold or something.”

“Dad, you know you banned me from using social media like Facebook until I was over thirteen? Well, is it all right for me to use it now?”

“Yes, sure. Just be careful that’s all. We don’t want you getting mixed up with people you don’t know. There are some weirdoes on the Internet. You know that, don’t you? By the way, it wasn’t only your mother and I that did not want you to use Facebook and the like. Facebook has a rule – no under thirteen-year-olds. So, it was their rule not ours. We just enforced Facebook’s rules. Now you’re over thirteen, so by all means go ahead. Do you need any help with that?”

“No, Dad, I don’t think so. I’ll figure it out, but I’ll call you if I don’t understand something, all right?”

“Sure, you do that. See you downstairs for tea later.”

Megan caressed the keys of her new laptop. She ran her fingers over them as if stroking a favourite pet and then put the cursor in the address box and typed ‘facebook.com’. The screen changed and she was asked to login or register. Not having an account, she registered, carried out the instructions and was setting up her home page within minutes.

When she was done, she did a search for her friend Jane’s page, but it was not immediately forthcoming, so she opened a new window and entered ‘twitter.com’. Megan was able to set this up equally quickly, but she couldn’t find Jane’s account there either, so she emailed her. Megan had been using computers for years and she had email accounts with Yahoo and Hotmail. She even had a very old copy of the Microsoft Office Suite, which her father had left on the computer he had brought home from work for her, but not having her own domain, she was stuck with Yahoo and Hotmail.

This laptop came with a cut-down version of Microsoft Office 10 and lots of trial software and games that she spent some time looking through while waiting for Jane’s reply. She looked at the clock on the wall. Jane was probably still down at the Mall. She spent a lot of time there, but then her parents were not as strict as Megan’s.

Megan checked the power of her battery. It was fully charged, so she removed it as she had heard lots of her friends say that the battery was the most easily damaged part of a computer and the main cause was over-charging. She stroked it again and felt quite grown-up to have her own laptop.

Suddenly the computer beeped, so she checked her email, but there was nothing there but junk. Then she noticed a number in the Facebook tab, so clicked on that. It was a Facebook message from Jane – her very first social media message. She replied and ‘Liked’ her friend’s page. It was the first time she had ‘Liked’ or ‘Followed’ anyone. She went back to her own page to add some content and was pleased to see that Jane had liked her page too.

She went back to Jane’s page and looked through her list of friends, clicking on any mutual friends’ images, going to their Facebook and liking them. Hoping that they would soon like her back. Jane had over eight hundred friends and she knew a lot of them too – mostly from school. She found it addictive, but knew that most of her friends would not be sitting at home on a Saturday afternoon like she was, so she was unlikely to get many replies until after tea.

Megan switched to Twitter and typed ‘supernatural’ into the search box. About a dozen examples of people using the word recently came up, so she clicked the first one and went over to the lady’s Twitter page. She had more than five thousand followers, so Megan clicked on her home page and read a few dozen of the Tweets.

It was disappointing, because most of the messages were rubbish – just adverts, but some were interesting and she clicked on those to follow the posters. This went on for some time, until the light dimmed outside and she heard her mother calling her down for tea. Her first reaction was to be a little annoyed at being disturbed, but she knew that that was not the right attitude and made a mental note not to become addicted to social media like some of her friends said that they were. Reluctantly, she went downstairs.

“Sorry, Mam.”

“Didn’t you hear me calling you? I shouted three times!”

“How’s the new computer going?” asked her father.

“No, I didn’t hear you, Mam, I must have been so engrossed in what I was doing… Yes, it’s working very well, Dad. It’s so much faster than the old